


Conflagration

by foundCarcosa



Category: Fable (Video Game)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-04
Updated: 2012-07-04
Packaged: 2017-11-09 04:15:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 936
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/451151
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/foundCarcosa/pseuds/foundCarcosa
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The morally-ambiguous mage is forced to remember a past that is much less ambiguous.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Conflagration

Garth doesn’t dream.  
He’s stopped dreaming long ago, sometime between the Second Death and the Third Death — generic, empty names he’s given to the most tragic moments of his life, in order to leach the emotion out of them and prevent them from plaguing him.

There were people fortunate enough to dream — the good-hearted, the well-meaning, the beloved.  
And there were people fortunate enough not to have any nocturnal wanderings at all — the psychopathic, the guiltless, the so-far-gone, the mad.

And then there were people like Garth.

He _knows_ he will wander the dank, dusty halls of his memory this night; he knows it before his head touches the pillow, before he draws his hands tight into his chest and rolls to one side, before his brow furrows and his mouth sets into a thin, harsh line and he slowly slides out of consciousness.  
But there is naught to be done but weather it.

The moon’s silvery light blinks off, snuffed by a rolling stormcloud, and Garth steps into the Fade.

\--

“Come, mine, we shall have words,” she says, firmly, but he won’t hear. Lip curled in something like derision — but for whom, he doesn’t yet know — he tears his arm from her grasp and mutters something about having no more words to give.

The Samarkand sun hovers over the horizon, quivering in the shimmering heat, unsure of whether to drop and leave the land in darkness. For the first time since he was a boy, Garth wishes fervently for it to set.

“You are not well, mine. I know it. You quicken with…” She is looking for the word, and Garth knows the word, but he would be loath to provide it. She touches him again, gentler this time as if to draw him away from the window and into her musk-scented embrace.

“Leave me be.”  
With a sigh, she leaves him be.

It is one of the children who incites his rage the next night — full night, the sun so far gone they’ve already forgotten its light. The boy darts out into the shadows, and Garth nearly breaks his neck in frantic pursuit.

“What did I tell you!” The boy is frightened, his father’s thundering voice vibrating the air. “Speak! _What did I tell you?”_

“The night is where the dark things lurk,” the boy stutters, nearly pissing his trousers, but the words are correct. That is what Garth had drilled into him -- Garth, who knew the Samarkand night too well. “The night does not kill what is without, but it will destroy what is— what is within…”

“Get in!” A ringing slap against the side of the boy’s round head, and a kick towards the door. Fear that had coiled deep in Garth’s gut in the moments before he’d caught up with the boy melted into fury that lit him up like a oil lamp. The air didn’t stop vibrating when he stopped speaking.

“Why did you?” his mother asks the silently weeping boy, softly, patiently, her voice like a balm on the wounds inflicted by his father’s lashing voice. “Why? To make him give chase, my one? To make him furious?”

There is only one answer to that.  
Garth’s son bears no love for the man who sits hunched over ancient tomes and grimoires during suppertime, who glows faintly when the lights are out, who lights flames with fingers instead of flint. A boy cannot love that which frightens him.

The third night — it is always threes, it is always — is when the skies crackle with lightning, a storm that brings no rain to arid, unforgiving Tir'qun, the last clanhold before the bleak and forbidding Western Wastes.  
The third night is when the girl, the baby girl, squalls endlessly with wordless agony. When Garth cradles his traitorous hand close to his body and attempts to calm his stuttering heart.

“How could you!” she rages at him, in her quiet, harsh manner. “The children are frightened of you already! And you would hurt them? You would harm my baby, my one?”

 _My_ baby. _My_ one. Not theirs, though they had made this miracle of life together during a time when he would touch her. But _hers._

She steps back, unwillingly but cautiously, and he knows he’s already begun to glow warningly.   
“Quiet, mine. Please.” Words spoken, not commandingly, but pleadingly. This fury is not his alone; he cannot harness it if it rises.  
He wishes not to hurt her.  
He wishes not to hurt at all.

“I am not yours,” she whispers harshly, and he knows — he _thinks_ he knows… — these are lashing words borne of pain and anger, lashing words that held no true weight, but knowledge and emotion are never in accord.

Garth’s spurned need and twisted love and grotesque fury is fire.  
They all scream then. The boy and the girl and his One, they all scream.

The grimoire is black. It is bound in dyed flesh. It is the source of all Garth’s learnt thus far, and the source of all he suffers.  
It is the only thing that survives the blaze.  
The only thing, save for Garth. Or… Garth’s body and mind.  
Some say, 'two out of three ain’t bad'.

\--

Garth cannot breathe when he leaps awake. Smoke clogs his lungs and billows up from his throat, and his eyes tear from the inhalation.

It takes mere moments to douse the bed with conjured water, to keep it from burning away underneath him, but it takes much, much longer than that for him to regain his composure.

When the sun rises, he is achingly grateful, but still empty.


End file.
